Together Again For The First Time

I have very few friends on the face of this planet. Justin Timpane is one of them. Three of my best friends in high school were Sammy G, Ben Schuman, and Kevin Graham.

So Justin found himself in the possession of a CD, created by Brett Clawson (an acquaintance of his and mine). Sam, Ben, Kevin, and I formed a band in high school called "Wayward Sun". Brett had taken it upon himself to extract the audio from a tape we'd made, entitled "Together Again For The First Time", and put it into CD format. That must have taken hours; I couldn't believe someone would put in that much time.

Well, Justin took it a step further. He ripped all the songs, piped them through Cool Edit, applied some noise reduction and other techniques to restore the sound quality, and here's the result! Unfortunately, our original master was crap, and that's reflected in garbling on a couple of the tracks, but the songs still sound better than they ever did on tape. Click "read more" to read the full description and either download or stream the MP3 files.

All songs are 320kbps MP3, so if the tune sounds bad, blame it on our mastering & recording abilities at the time, not on the MP3. This, unfortunately, means you have absolutely zero chance of streaming these files unless you have a 480kbps or higher connection. (ISDN? Forget it. DSL? Maybe. Cable? Probably, as long as it's not a peak time.)

Wayward Sun was:

• Jon Brusco: Bass. He left the band before we produced any tapes. If I recall correctly, he and Sam were like peanut butter and motor oil: they just don't make a good sandwich together. Funny that they were my two best friends, but didn't like one another much. Ben replaced him.
• Ben Schuman: Keyboards, Vocals, Guitar
• Kevin Graham: Drums, Keyboards, Vocals.
• Sammy G: Keyboards, Bass Guitar, Vocals.
• Matt Barnson: Keyboards, Guitar, Vocals.
• Ed Copeland: Guitar. He replaced me when in 1992 I went on a mission for the LDS church, and was the guitarist featured on "No Further ?", the band's third album.

Yeah, it was kind of funny that we all played the piano. We used this in a couple performances by having all the band members switch positions to play a different instrument. I'll never forget Ben Schuman showing me up on guitar playing a cover of "Silent Lucidity" by Queensryche. I'm still bitter ;)

So, enough with the formalities!

Stream the whole shebang from song 1 to song 10 by clicking this link.

• Wayward Sun, our title track! I believe Ben's Schuman's exact words, after playing bass on the keyboard at our first rehearsal after Jon Brusco stopped playing bass for us, were "Guys, playing bass for this song is really boring." I think it was at that moment that Sam began saving money towards buying his first bass guitar. Sam, wasn't that bass Jon's old one, actually?
• A Moment Away From You. Featuring Ben Schuman on lead vocals, this piece forever cemented Kevin Graham's hate of electronic drums, and Matt Barnson's shortcomings as a lead guitarist.
• Pushing Us Down. The requisite 16-year-old rage against the power of parents. The whole tune started one day when I was goofing off with the Ensoniq synthesizer in the front room of my folks home. Sam was chilling out on the couch in the family room, around the other side of the house. I had it turned up pretty loud. Anyway, I was playing with the sequencing function, just noodling. I noodled for about an hour, then took a break for a minute and heard Sam yell from the next room "Hey, don't stop playing, I'm writing words for that!". Thus the song was born. I think Sam was pissed at his Dad that day. Or was it is his sister? He spent a lot of time pissed in high school :)
• Wrong Words. Required slow tune. This also was a fun tune to kick around as a quartet at parties. Kevin would sit down to the piano, and the rest of us would crowd around. We'd act like we were so into the music, really artsy-like, all the while eyeing the girls that would inevitably cluster aound us like seagulls on garbage. Mmm, I don't think I like that allegory, but anyway, it was a great chick-grabbing tune :)
• Madness. This was one of Wayward Sun's signature tunes. We liked it so much that at one of our concerts poolside, we were asked to tone it down by the management. Kevin had a pretty killer double-drumset for that show and from that point on began lusting for double kicks.
• Mad Mad World. This is Ben, all Ben, except some vocals! This one fits into the "great tune but impossible to play live" category. And made Kevin even more bitter about electronic drums :) If I ever upload our second album, you'll notice that we never had just a drum machine on our next two albums. I sang along with this one yesterday, and realized I could hit the low notes. When we originally recorded it, we had to speed up the tape so that I could. And then Ben overdubbed me anyway ;)
• Sweet Lori. What was Lori's last name, anyway? I can't remember, but she was one of those "untouchable" girls. She was, to my 15-year-old eyes, incredibly beautiful, delicate-looking, sweet high soprano voice, and acerbic wit that made you think you were stung by a butterfly. Apparently, Sam thought the same and wrote this ode to her.
• Into The Night. This is, quite possibly, one of the most boring tunes in existence. I wrote it one day following onto the success of Sam's rebellious "Pushing Us Down". I figured I could do "evil" just like Sammy G. I learned that NOBODY does Evil better than Sammy G. And here's the permanent record of it. I click the "skip" button in XMMS (an MP3 player like WinAmp) when I get to this one.
• The Sky Is Always There. This is, alternatively, titled "This Guy Is Always There" because, well, it's impossible to tell which one is the right words. According to our first-ever concert for, oh, crap, what was my old girlfriend's name? (Edit in February 2005: Her name was Grace. Don't remember the last name, but she was the girlfriend that had pity on me for passing out during photos and cracking my head against the stage floor in high school). Her dad handed us $200 for performing there when we'd agreed to work for $30. That permanently inflated our fragile egos, I think. Anyway, I introduced the song as "written for a dead aunt", and unfortunately pronounced "aunt" "ant". Alas, the imagery of singing to an insect is more powerful than the original intent.
• On My Way. It provided a nice bookend for the opening tune, but unfortunately our "fast song skills" at that point rendered "Wayward Sun" and "On My Way" as sounding really, really similar. This song is probably most memorable as living on forever as a much slower tune where Ben Schuman lampooned all of our band's tunes. Think Weird Al's "Polkas on 45", but a little stranger.